MinerAlert
MinerAlert
The Rubin Center at The University of Texas at El Paso is proud to announce the founding of the Gaspar Enriquez Cultural Center in partnership with Paso del Norte Community Foundation. The Center will be housed in Mi Casa Gallery, a historic adobe building lovingly restored by the artist, and stewarded by the Rubin Center in perpetuity. Following Gaspar’s example, the project will inspire future generations of artists and activists to engage in meaningful ways with the San Elizario community through art and culture.
The GECC will become a site for UTEP student-led programming and outreach, providing sites for hands-on learning in studio arts, museum studies, art education, public history, and environmental humanities. Over the next five years, the Rubin Center and College of Liberal Arts collaborators will launch a series of exhibitions, youth projects, and outreach initiatives in dialogue with the San Elizario community.
The GECC will launch the weekend of October 19-21st, with opening activities to celebrate the exhibition Collidoscope: De La Torre Brothers Retro-Perspective, installed between the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts and Mi Casa Gallery in San Elizario.
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A native El Pasoan, Gaspar Enriquez is a Chicano painter, portraitist, and educator based in San Elizario, in El Paso County, Texas. Enriquez was born in the historic Segundo Barrio of El Paso. He completed his Bachelor’s degree at The University of Texas at El Paso in 1970 and his Master’s degree in metals from New Mexico State University in 1985. He taught at Bowie High School in El Paso for 34 years. Enriquez's images are visual and emotional statements that explore the history and continuity of Mexican-American culture, from his community on the U.S.-Mexico border. His work was included in the 1990-1993 exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA) and Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge (2001-2007), an exhibition of work in the Cheech Marin collection. His paintings are collected by museums including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, de Young Museum, Tucson Museum Of Art, and the El Paso Museum of Art, among many others. He was named a 2023 Texas State Visual Artist by the Texas Commission on the Arts. |
One is born a Mexican American, but one chooses to be a Chicano. My work reflects a politically-charged lifestyle that passes from one generation to the next, surviving poverty, wars, prisons, and internal strife. The men and women who populate my paintings reflect the paradoxes that arise in the barrio - pride in place and language, a search for self-esteem and meaning in a landscape of poverty, and the fragility that comes with learning too much about life too soon. As an American artist with a Hispanic background, my art is about the personal relationships and events that dominate my two-culture environment. Soy Chicano.
The Gaspar Enriquez Cultural Center (GECC) supports the coming together of artists, students, and community members through activities in artmaking, environmental stewardship, and preservation of history while re-centering San Elizario in the heart of El Paso County. Led by the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts in collaboration with UTEP College of Liberal Arts, it provides a dynamic training ground for future museum and arts professionals from our majority Latinx student body.